A Global Idea: Youth, City Networks, and the Struggle for the Arab World
186
A Global Idea: Youth, City Networks, and the Struggle for the Arab World
186Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781501771095 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2023 |
| Pages: | 186 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
What People are Saying About This
Mayssoun Sukarieh's writing packs a powerful punch. A Global Idea shines crucial light on the networks of people in Washington, DC, Amman, and Dubai tasked with creating and disseminating the youth development complex in the Middle East.
With stunning lucidity and exemplary empirical specificity, A Global Idea manages the almost impossible. It offers a powerful and persuasive new theory of and a perfect methodology for analyzing how global ideas travel, not through the air or media, but through global and gateway cities in an unequal world, dense social networks, and transnational organizations working locally on the ground. Taking the case of the spectacular rise of the "youth development complex" in the Middle East after the "war on terror" Sukarieh shows brilliantly how ideas (and ideologies) about youth, education, and entrepreneurship that are central to the workings of global capitalism got taken up as common-sense in the region, with devastating effects on political imaginations and possibilities.
This is a work of rare intellectual insight and originality, showing how ideas embed themselves in cities which help, in turn, to propagate the category of youth in various Arab cities and at various moments of time—-an outstanding contribution to the social history of the Arab world.
Well written and highly original, A Global Idea shows us how a youth-focused discourse originating from the heart of the global neoliberal order spread though regional hubs in the Middle East.
Global Idea brings together different disciplines—critical development studies, urban studies, Middle East studies, youth studies—in an entirely unique and compelling way.
Mayssoun Sukarieh's book is an ethnographic story of the diffusion of an idea of youth, not class or ethnicity, from Washington DC to the Middle East. A must read.
This brilliant book shows that the category of "youth", naturalized by demographers, states, non-profit organizations and civil society actors, is in fact a recent and man-made category whose short history is part of the effort to define and subsidize a global identity while defusing its radical potential.
In A Global Idea, Mayssoun Sukarieh examines how the discourse on youth and development, emanating from Washington, utilizing notions of democracy, human rights, women's empowerment, and poverty reduction, etc. was introduced and consciously invested in selected Arab states in order to integrate, or rather re-integrate, the region, under the rubric or 'youth development' into a wider political agenda of the global capitalist economy. One of the most original contributions of this book revolves around the contradictory features of the celebrated 'youth rebellion' during the Arab Spring of 2010-2012. On the one hand the author shows how the mass movement that erupted in the region, including teachers, trade unions, farmers and women, was inaccurately attributed to an amorphous category of 'youth'. On the other hand she shows how the expectations of radical transformation that took place in Libya, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and the neighboring countries, was undermined and subverted by a strategy of pacification and neo-liberal enhancement in the status of urban elites.
Mayssoun Sukarieh's outstanding book returns to the foundational questions raised by Karl Mannheim on the sociology of generations. In her case it is youth politics and the rise of what she calls a global youth development complex and their relation to contemporary global capitalism. The book brilliantly explores three inter-related global cities – Washington DC, Amman and Dubai – each of which serves as an incubator and laboratory for a powerful set of ideas, discourses, practices and policies that travel globally, shaping youth-oriented NGOs, think tanks and development projects. Space matters and each city plays a different role in the genesis of a transnational network of ideas about youth and youth development across the Middle East. A Global Idea is a timely, provocative and path-breaking intervention.